Thursday, 4 March 2010

Time Off, Down Time, Round Up

I have taken some time off this week, I have been to the beach with my two golden retriever puppies. My one dog, Seth, hates the car so we were a little concerned that he wouldn’t like it. After a couple of puppy travel sickness tablets though he calmed right down and chilled out for the hour or so car ride. So the four of us made our way to the Gower in South Wales. I think we have the second largest tidal range in the world and the tide was out, so we had miles and miles of wet sand to play fetch and chase the seagulls. I went to University in Swansea, I left there in 2002 and I never really a lot of time in the Gower but this week we have been there a few times and my dogs think its the best place on the planet.

I do have some great photo’s but I haven’t got them off the camera yet, when I do I will post the here.

Anyway, I have been scheduling the blog posts for a while now and writing them using Windows Live Writer, its a neat tool and I would recommend it to anyone thinking of blogging. I have have had a few posts lined up for this week so I haven’t had to write about SQL Server while I was off and yet my blog gets updated regularly. My travels got me thinking about my blog though, downtime usually does that for me and I have few posts lined for the near future, some of which include:

Setting up a mirrored database

‘Sargable’ WHERE clauses

Minimising the downtime when migrating between SQL Server versions.

So I have a few more subjects that I want to write about but I have no more posts scheduled. If I’m going to stick to my schedule of 3 posts a week I need to write one before Sunday, which I think should be a more than achievable target. When I started the blog I didn’t know what frequency with which to write. but 3 times a week I’m just about keeping up with, I’m syndicated on SSC and since that happened I know that a lot more people are reading what I’m writing which does give me a lot more motivation for writing.

Anyway my posts thus far have been about what I have done and what I have learned in the week gone by, usually about SQL Server so I thought seeing that this week I have learned that my puppies like the sea, chasing seagulls and sausage and chips so I thought that I should write about it. I hope you don’t mind. My next posts will be a more technical post